Derelict Star

Incredible game! It's a true open-world exploration precision platformer. You have all your movement skills available from the get go and discovering how it works is part of the fun. The game displays your speed and movement state on screen at all times, helping you visualize it, and there's an incredible Hint menu / glossary going progressively deeper into the details of every mechanic, with you being able to choose how much you want to reveal yourself. It is a pretty hard game, but there's an Assist menu with a bunch of options for you to make it fun for yourself. I'm using Custom Checkpoints + Progress myself.

really fun and tight platformer :3

A beautifully crafted precision platformer that explores its mechanics thoroughly. There's a generous amount of things to do, all presented with great care and restraint. Experienced platform game players are in for a real treat.

The platforming in this game is really something special. Movement feels precise without ever being twitchy. Getting a screen right feels like being in complete control, there's something almost meditative about it, especially combined with the sound design and general atmosphere. This kept things from ever becoming too frustrating, despite this being a very difficult game. It took me about 20 hours to get to the ending without assists, going back every now and then over a few months. I'll probably go for the rest of the power cells at some point, or at least finish exploring the map to figure out how to reach all of them.

i'm in green world and i'm scared 10/10

I took a month long break to play other things because I wasn't sucked into the game in the way that I was expecting. Clearly I wasn't in the right headspace because I restarted this week and everything clicked into place. It took a little bit for everything to click into place, but if you have the willingness, that time is worth it.

"Oh, I can definitely pull off this jump this time-NNNOOOOO!" Derelict Star is a great example of how a seemingly simple design can produce immensely complex challenge that is all around impressive, though for me it was simply too much to deal with. With miniamlist visuals and music, the game has very little to show off in the audiovisual department. Some passable chiptunes that play on rare occasions, the endles bumps of boots and physics impacts and very little else are on offer when it comes to sound, and the blocky pixel art is functional and passable, while obscuring the core of the game. Derelic Star lives and dies on its mechanics. A pure physics-based platformer where a running start and clever use of the jetpack and wall bounces are keys to success, with a vast variety of obstacles and challenges to overcome. Much of the finer detail of movement comes from the sub-pixel movements taking place under the hood, which provide a level of precision the art cannot convey, and can also lead to frustration when a control input does influence the game in ways that may not be represented visually as any form of character movement at all. There are sure to be a lot of people out there who will jump with joy at the pure challenge on offer here, but for me it was just too much to deal with. Just finding a path to one of the batteries that need to be collected to advance the game is a challenge and the way back is a gruelling, unforgiving slog of pixel-perfect jumps and bounces and leaps where a sigle mistake will send you all the way to the beginning of the sequence. I'd imagine the vast majority of players will give up early on, unable to rise to the occasion, much as I did. As it stands, for most people, I just cannot recommend Derelict Star despite its impressive mechanics. Based on achievements less than 10% of players seem to have come anywhere close to beating the game, suggesting at a remarkably high rate of attrition. But if you are the rare breed that thrives on frustration, repetition and perfection, you will find something special here that might just scratch an very specific sort of itch for you. Playtime: 3+ hours (A single session of play until a good old-fashioned ragequit) Ratings (1-10) Visual: 6 Audio: 3 Story: 2 Gameplay: 8 Overall: 4